After seeing an excellent talk by Jon Mott on the future of the LMS, I was amazed that he had the kind of data we were looking for. He had surveyed his faculty to find out (AKA low-tech analytics), and graciously agreed to share his survey instrument with us.

With that great input, I created this simple survey to understand faculty LMS usage:

This data served as a baseline comparison for all of the LMS candidates we looked at. We assumed that any “future LMS” we looked at needed to contain all of these functions that faculty are already depending on to run their courses. Once we had this, we evaluated the candidates against this baseline standard. We also polled our faculty to ask which features, NOT currently in our Blackboard instance, would they like to see implemented as part of our “future LMS”. We wanted to understand what kinds of features they were excited about integrating in their teaching practice. This is the data generated:

The ability to submit grades to the Registrar from inside your gradebook: 81.9%

The ability to upload video & multimedia content for my students to watch within the course space: 75%

The ability to read course content in an RSS reader like Google Reader: 23.6%

The ability to create a personal home page with contact information, recent activity, and other customizable content (like a Facebook or LinkedIn profile): 20.8%

To have the option to post coursework or announcements to “the outside world” (e.g. give it a public URL that is visible to non-SMU users): 16.7%

We used this data to evaluate our LMS candidates (Blackboard 9, Moodlerooms Joule, and Instructure Canvas) and having this data was critical in determining which system would meet our needs. Ultimately, we adopted Canvas because it provided all of the top 5 most requested features and all of the baseline features for about 1/3 of the cost of Bb 9’s most limited package. There was considerable resistance to moving off Blackboard among the university community, and having this data was extremely useful in clarifying why Canvas was the right choice.

I hope this article is helpful in your process of evaluating your university’s technology choices.

Ted Curran is an Instructional Technologist doing R&D in Emerging Models for Pearson Learning. He is committed to empowering teachers and students to create transformational change through effective pedagogy and technology integration. You can follow me on G+ or Twitter, or learn more at the 'About" page. These thoughts are my own.

Ted, the link to the survey takes me to the spreadsheet view of the survey, I’m unable to switch to form view to see how you created the survey questions, the form view option is greyed out for me. Could you please share it with me, my email is radhika.inaganti@gmail.com, thanks!

Ted, the link to the survey takes me to the spreadsheet view of the survey, I’m unable to switch to form view to see how you created the survey questions, the form view option is greyed out for me. Could you please share it with me, my email is radhika.inaganti@gmail.com, thanks!